Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday August 24, 2010 @06:54PM
from the you-can't-handle-the-truth dept.

Doug52392 writes "Following days of increased activity, the Russian numbers station UVB-76 has sent out a new voice transmission. The transmission, sent out on August 23, 2010 at 9:35AM PST, recited the following in Russian: 'UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4' The station, believed to be a part of the former Soviet Union's dead man's switch system, has been continually broadcasting for over twenty years, and its purpose has never been fully explained."

At 21:58 GMT on Christmas Eve 1997, 15 years after it was first observed, the buzzing abruptly stopped; to be replaced by a short series of beeps, followed by a male voice speaking Russian who repeated the following message several times:
“Ya — UVB-76. 18008. BROMAL: Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 742, 799, 14.

Seems like this isn't the first time there has been a similar broadcast. The names appear to be just a way of confirming the spelling of a message, like someone saying "that's A as in Apple". In this case, the message is 93 882 N as in Nikolai, A as in Anna, etc. Still interesting to think about what the purpose might be, though.

I doubt that, from what I can tell this radio transmission uses AM high frequency. MF/HF (which are used by this and other typical radio broadcasts) won't travel that much through water. For communication with submarines VLF and ELF is used as it has decent penetration, plus because of the very low transmission rates (data rates) that can be achieved audio/voice transmission isn't possible so they have to rely on simple text messages.

I'm betting on agent contact. They have at least one spy in some isolated location/circumstances, where they don't want to attract attention by physically contacting the person(s) to update equipment or set up some new communications channel. (or they have updated procedures, but occasionally something glitches and they use this as a fall back system until they can fix it). This person or persons is/are under deep cover, probably with a goal of stealing technical, business related secrets such as manufactur

Well, that's the purpose of "numbers stations" in general - the sending of messages to operatives in the field via off-the-shelf technology that any civilian might own. Not much is known about the stations, but I read about some lady in East Germany (before the fall of the wall, obviously) who used a radio to receive messages from the West German Intelligence (BND) telling her where to go to get out of the East and into the West. That's the only account I've ever read of someone actually telling their story of using a numbers station. The stations, from analysis of the traffic, serve multiple operatives. Opening up a new station for each operative would be a bit costly:) These stations can make broadcasts to all agents (as in the case of the partially-decrypted Cuban numbers station, that congratulated all their female operatives on international woman's day), or to specific agents. They use one-time pads, so unless someone gets a hold of the pad (or they re-use one), there is absolutely no way to crack the broadcasts. The buzzer, however, is a different kind of station, with a different mission.

This thing seems to be in the middle of a military base and is operated by a human through an open microphone, not by a machine. So it means that the current government knows about it and keeps using it for the same or other purpose for which it was designed.

and keeps using it for the same or other purpose for which it was designed.

Consider this: if you want to hide something, hide it in plain view.

But I can imagine this is also a great inside joke, imagine this:

Young eager cadet: "Sergei, what is this?"
"Our top of the line distraction and nuclear defence device!"
"How does it work?"
"We keep on broadcasting this pendula going over this magnetic field"
"Why?"
"Oh, you see... The CIA is listening since 1982 and can imagine it's a nuclear reaction device or anything they can come up with. We use it joke around since the signal can be picked up everywhere in Russia."
"How?"
"Do you see this microphone?"
"Yes..."
"Say, I met this girl Naimina and I want to share story and her number and zipcode with my comrades..."
reaches for microphone: "UVB-76, UVB-76 -- 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 -- 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4"

It'd like a radio transmitter in northern Canada or Alaska, there aren't roads, not many airfields, its going to be out of helicopter range, the weather sucks and for added difficultly, there is an integrated air defense network.

Location: The station's transmitter is located at Povarovo, Russia (56458N 37522E / 56.08278N 37.08944E / 56.08278; 37.08944), which is about halfway between Zelenograd and Solnechnogorsk and 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Moscow, near the village of Lozhki.

2009 is the obscured picture you linked to2005 has white clouds badly obscuring half the area2004 is exactly what you linked to

Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites [google.com]. Blurring are would not be different between the very crisp imagery for coordinates in question (aside from the stupid clouds!) and the Woodlawn Cemetery in my link.

Another poster did give out a link with ground pictures of the supposed site, though it's all in russian and has a bunch random nature pictures. For the lazy, the map DOES shut up anyone believing this is a remote area --there's several roads and towns near the forest for those coordinates. Then, again, I'm not sure how/. could validate b>anyone's coordinates or "translations" of these Russian-language sources...;-)

Things at that zoom level are NOT from satellites. They're from aircraft areal photos. These photos only exist where there is an interesting market where someone can sell Google (or bing, or whoever) a license to show them.

Maybe pay-for subscribers have newer imagery of the site and can repost. The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows. The long straight lines on the grass are just ground partitions of some sort and are unlikely to be parallel to the antenna's clock-like moving shadow exactly as the imaging satellite passed by. If you're in doubt, notice even gravestone cross's shadows are easily picked up from satellites [google.com]

That gravestone is probably a massive solid hunk of stone, and has a solid continuous shadow.

An antenna, on the other hand, is typically constructed as a truss or mesh of rather thin metal pieces, perhaps supported by guy-wires -- it's mostly air, and the shadow, accordingly, will be composed of very thin lines widely separated by areas of no shadow. That may well not be noticeable from a satellite.

"The clear picture is odd: can't distinguish ANY antenna shadows from all the building shadows."

Don't zoom in, zoom out.

First thing I noticed is that the building is definitely the highest structure in the shot (Wikipedia image). Most objects have no shadow in this shot, so it must be mid-day. Judging by the size of the shadow of the main building, it is probably 3-5 stories tall. I am not sure of the size of the antenna used for this frequency, but it could be in the building if it is small enough...but I doubt this is the case.

Zoom out further.

Notice the disturbed soil in a near perfect square surrounding the base? See the "stepped", grassy area along the lower side of the square? Those stepped areas indicate a rise in elevation, terraced to prevent erosion (they are also inadvertently created by cattle grazing on slopes). If you look closely, you will see similar indications all the way around this square. What appears, at first glance, to be cleared areas are actually slopes--The base is underground, or rather it was built, then buried, then camouflaged.

You might have also noticed that there are NO ground vehicles parked anywhere in sight. My guess is that all vehicles simply drive into the main building and are either parked inside it, or elevatored underground to hide how many people are (or, are not) actually using the facility.

What I find really interesting is the sheer number of OLD roads that seem to radiate outwards from this site. The Google image shows them clearly, as well as a nearby railhead. Those access roads are old and over-grown, some very much so. In short, people have been coming and going, from all directions, to this location for some time. What was here before the transmitter started up, to merit this much access?

what we need is to stop tracking *transmitters* and start tracking *receivers*.

sort of like how in BASIC you can convert your code from using GOTO style to using COMEFROM style branching. sort of like that. employ logic like that and you can reverse bias the trackers to tune in on the receivers, instead.

Sure it does! Just make time run backward and we can see all the little radio-photons running toward the transmitter! Or better yet, try and detect the subtle field distortions caused by antennas absorbing radio frequency energy.

Okay Brain! But umm...where are we going to find Superman at this time of night?

The station's transmitter is located just outside Povarovo, Russia at (...,...), which is about halfway between Zelenograd and Solnechnogorsk and 40 kilometres (25 mi) northwest of Moscow, near the village of Lozhki. The location and callsign were unknown until the first voice broadcast of 1997.

I think I've heard this station's buzzing a few times, while drifting around on my HF transceiver. Have to note the frequency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76 [wikipedia.org] and poke around again for grins.

There's a lot of numbers stations around the world. The Conet project offers a selection of recordings from many of them (available on the Internet Archive [archive.org]). Unless you have some specific reason to believe that you tuned into this particular one, I would guess that you just picked up one at random.

Well, it hasn't really been broadcasting continuously, as it went suddenly offline two months ago. This was previously discussed on slashdot [slashdot.org] at the time. It *had* been broadcasting continuously for 20 years until then, however.

- The cultural/political/ideological orientation of much of the population of the United States falls into one of two major groupings. (They tend to be called things like "liberal" and "conservative", "left" and "right", or other pairs of names. But they're each coalitions of many subgroups bound by rough agreement on a few major points.)
- The broadcast news media became sufficiently (and visibly) biased in its programming that the members of one of the groupings felt that they were not being served by it. This created a market opportunity. (This was similar to the one that spawned CNN, when mainstream news migrated from news reportage to infotainment-product generation.)
- Fox News marketed itself as providing "fair and balanced" coverage - half from the viewpoint of each of the two groupings. This made them the only show in town for the one that felt underserved. Thus they grabbed the eyballs of about half the population's newswatchers to sell to their advertisers.
- This worked until about the 2008 campaign, when it became clear that Fox News was serving only one (Neocon) of the four-or-so major and several minor factions within the underserved group. This left several large (and moneyed) factions feeling underserved again and created another marketing opportunity.
- Fox News is going after the biggest coalition of the remaining factions (libertarians + paleoconservatives + {"Tea Party" minus neocons}) with new shows on their "Fox Financial Network" feed.

TV news is easy to understand once you get that it has two purposes:
1) Making money by selling eyeball time to advertisers.
2) Exercising political power by inserting itself between the people in office and the rest of the world and creating a false image of the constituents' opinions and world events for the office-holders.

I have it on right now in the background. There used to be an alternating tone at the top of the hour that kicked in suddenly and always gave me the shivers, but it stopped doing that a few years ago. Sometimes I tune in late at night, since the monotone drone of the buzzer can get pretty psychedelic. Good for coding. Never been lucky enough to catch a voice broadcast, though I did hear some crosstalk once. I even started work on a C daemon to autocorrelate the signal and auto-record any voice transmissions, but that got put on hold.Pictures of the transmission site: http://alex-odn.livejournal.com/12148.html [livejournal.com]

Really creepy stuff... I've been listening to a live stream of the signal for about two hours now, and at around 11:07 EST, I heard about 30 seconds of what distinctly sounded like high pitched morse code, which apparently a number of people have reported hearing over the last two days at various times.

1) Because no one in charge really gives a crap about a station that barely appears on a country's military budget
2) Because the aforementioned station is just a repeater
3) Security thru obscurity = not having to pay guards with guns

Just some thoughts. There is an unmanned 100kw FM transmitter and 305m tower not far from where I grew up in the farm fields of central MN. Huge Pirate Radio can be yours by picking a 7-pin lock.

I'm rather surprised that the general public is both unaware and unconcerned that the entire Russian atomic arsenal is armed, pointed at us and the trigger autonomous... it will trigger based on a set of circumstances unknown to us that were set up 50 years ago. As far as we know were are a ill timed Solar flare/DDOS attack/meteor strike away from nuclear Armageddon. Perhaps our government might want to discuss this situation in our next round of disarmament talks?

I'm rather surprised that the general public is both unaware and unconcerned that the entire Russian atomic arsenal is armed, pointed at us and the trigger autonomous... it will trigger based on a set of circumstances unknown to us that were set up 50 years ago.

I presume you're talking about "Perimeter" [wikipedia.org]. While it is supposedly capable of operating in autonomous mode, it's not the normal mode of operation. It's only supposed to be turned on when the danger of a sudden nuclear strike is very likely, so as to ensure a retaliatory strike even in the face of the most fast and overwhelming incoming attack. Assuming it still exists, it has most likely never been on since the dissolution of the USSR.

Worth noting that all of this is mostly conjecture. Aside from the fact that something along these lines exists, there's very little reliable data on what the system even is in practice. Of course, that's what makes it ripe for conspiracy theories.

Maybe the Russians are just fucking with everyone's mind for laughs. They know people are speculating, and perhaps they got the urge to feed the "I want to believe" crowd some raw meat. I would not be surprised if there is a hidden joke that will be revealed in a decade or so just so they can say "gotcha!".

One of the ideas of what the hell this thing is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76 [wikipedia.org]:"UVB-76 is widely believed to be used to transmit encoded messages to spies, as is generally assumed for the many numbers stations that populate shortwave frequencies. Transmitter sites for some numbers stations have been triangulated to military and/or intelligence installations in several countries,[citation needed] although no nation's government will confirm or deny the existence of the stations or their purpose."

Could this be related to the recent case of the 10 (with one on the run, right?) kinda-sorta-russian-spies news fest? It could be the Russians talking to other operatives they have lurking about.

Or maybe It's just some Russian dudes spending government money to boost their shares in tin & aluminum foil.

On ships and so on, they use names and stuff like that to encode words, so that when they speak them out over the radio there's less chance of being misheard. I don't know what that system is called but perhaps somebody else does. Sorry if I explained that badly.
Anyway, the message:
"UVB-76, UVB-76 — 93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74 — 9 3 8 8 2 nikolai, anna, ivan, michail, ivan, nikolai, anna, 7, 4, 1, 4, 3, 5, 7, 4'"
'naimina' is equivalent to Nikolai Anna Ivan Michael Ivan Nikolai Anna
Also, notice that the '74 14 35 74' is the same as '7 4 1 4 3 5 7 4'. The second half is just to make sure the other person got the message OK, I suppose.
That means the total message is just the first part, which is only:
"93 882 naimina 74 14 35 74"
That's way too short to encode very much more than anything informational. I'll bet it just says "Hey guys, happy birthday" or something.

On ships and so on, they use names and stuff like that to encode words, so that when they speak them out over the radio there's less chance of being misheard. I don't know what that system is called but perhaps somebody else does. Sorry if I explained that badly.

While there are several versions throughout the history of radio, the most common phonetic/spelling alphabet these days is the NATO phonetic alphabet:

We still use it in the military for standardized communications. For more specialized applications, you might hear the letter 'A' as 'acer' or 'T' as 'talon' to let the listener know that you are using a specific identifier (bay A, truck T, etc.) instead of spelling a word.

The transmission seems to follow the standard russian spelling template. Make of that what you will; I just thought I'd get you started.

Someone else may have caught this and it got buried in the deeper replies, but I find the 4 2-digit numbers to be very interesting. 74.14E 35.74N is right in the mountains of Pakistan controlled Kashmir. The second part of the message with the names is simply a phonetic spelling of the first part of the message. Naimina has several possible references, #1 on my list of likelihoods would refer to the owner of a website design company of that name targeting the Turkish language. No guess what 93 882 is - probably a predetermined instruction code undecipherable outside the network.

More Lat/Long stuff:
74.14W 35.74N is right off the coast of North Carolina & Southern Virginia.
74.14W 35.74S is right off the coast of Chile.
74.14E 35.74S is in the middle of nowhere, with Madagascar.

The most concerning thing is... imagine a flawless setup for an automated retaliation system, and the exact location of every component and operation of the system was only known by key individuals, all of whom died and failed to pass on the information to the more peacefully minded.

Now I'm sure Dead Hand isn't flawless, but how can we ever be sure the fossils of the Cold War aren't at any moment already invoking armageddon?

I can imagine the cruel irony where one day all of Humanity finally reaches a perfect state of peace, and deciding to hunt down and dismantle these "I'm taking you down with me" networks all sentience is magnificently eradicated on Earth.

This is the digital age, surely there is no reason to communicate in this manner anymore. My guess is that it's a Soviet Plot to distract the capitalist imperialist to spend billions of rubles to figure out what its significance is (I've never used that phrase "Soviet Plot" before in my life). You can imagine that the change in message is spurring Dick Cheney (or more likely Rush Limbaugh) to make a run at the White House just to figure it out.

Think about it, the amount of data being transmitted is trivial. We live in the internet age. This is at best a distraction made for those who visualize the modern era as a series of tubes.

If you're dealing with spies that have been planted since before the Internet age, you may not have a means of reaching them via the newfangled ways to communicate. This could very well be the only way to reach some of them, for all we know.

Although there are many conspiracy theorists out there, I'd say most people who have done basic research on "The Buzzer" have come to agree that it is a station used for Ionosphere research. Some details:

- Its frequency (4.625Mhz) is mentioned specifically in several scientific papers. One paper discusses a technique for ionosphere research using doppler shift measurements reflected from a high-frequency radio wave. (http://elpub.wdcb.ru/journals/rjes/v10/2007ES000227/2.shtml)- This paper refers to the signal as coming from a "stable basic generator", sending a carrier wave from a standard radio transmitter.- Several (supposed) radio experts have said that the signal being sent is the kind that would make sense for this kind of research - the tone sent at a fixed strength and amplitude/pitch, with a regular cutoff and regular repeat would be useful to measure doppler shift and falloff at the edge of the signal.- The paper above was authored (partially) by "S V Anisimov".- Sergei V Anisimov is the senior director of the "Borok Geophysical Observatory" (http://wwwbrk.adm.yar.ru/main_e.html), which does, among other things, Ionosphere research.- Borok Geophysical Observatory is based not tremendously far from the CONFIRMED location of the UVB-76 transmitter. It is easy to imagine that they could have an agreement with the owners of this transmitter (the russian government?) or own it themselves, and be using it for this research.

Conspiracy nuts will say that this is just a cover story.

It doesn't explain why the voice messages occur occasionally (some have theorized that having the random tones of a human voice can be used for other doppler measurements). And even if this research is occurring, it doesn't mean that this transmitter isn't used for other purposes as well. But nobody seems to mention any of this. The dead man's switch theory of world destruction is way more exciting, I guess.

UVB-76 has been broadcasting for 28 years. That's one hell of a long time to do research. It's also survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time of great economic turmoil where you'd expect a project like this to be first for the axe. A transmitter like that is not cheap to run or maintain.The transmitter is located in the military district of Moscow.There are two other sites in Russia that are purpose built for Ionosphere research that operate on much higher power, if they have such facilities then why the need for UVB-76?